“Ruxit” is Real: Russia’s Exit from Europe
Putin’s Russia never really wanted to be of Europe. Now, it doesn’t even want to be with Europe.
By Josef Janning, February 27, 2015
Credit: World Economic Forum - www.flickr.com
Leaving aside a few brief moments in the Russian policy discourse of the 1990s, post-Soviet Russia has always thought of the country’s role as being with Europe, but not of Europe.
Dating from the times of the Helsinki process, which led to the founding of the OSCE, a favored metaphor in Soviet and Russian thinking was the inclusive notion of a “common European house” from Lisbon to Vladivostok.
This space of sovereign states would include Russia as the largest among them – and the United States would be left on the margins or outside.
Turning the page on Russia
That chapter is closing now, as the Russian leadership abandons its own idea of inclusiveness. German Chancellor Angela Merkel used the term at the Davos World Economic Forum this year, but Moscow gave no answer to her invitation to return to the wider European discourse.
Vladimir Putin’s Russia has never really wanted to be of Europe, because the continent is now defined in political terms by the European Union and its rationale, norms and processes.
As former Warsaw Pact countries and the previously Soviet Baltic republics have turned to the West, the EU has expanded east and now shares borders with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine.
With the Ukraine war, Putin’s Russia also seems to have stopped wanting to be with Europe, because it feels its claim to remain a first-rate power has been disrespected and that the absence of a show of force allowed its interests to be overlooked.
In effect, Russia has become the Anti-Europe, organized by geopolitical reasoning and bound by military power, and it seeks just one thing from the West: respect borne out of fear for the harm it could do.
This Russia sees itself as entirely different from the EU in social and political norms, in its notion of a powerful and sovereign state and in its view of its national identity and mission.
Now, Moscow’s quest for status is focused on Washington. In Vladimir Putin’s world, Europe is second-class, troublesome but acquiescent. That some in Washington also look at Europe this way may help to reinforce his belief.
However, the EU is something different: Europeans might have misread the geopolitical significance of its Eastern Partnership scheme in the eyes of the neo-Russians in the Kremlin, but they were not naïve about the transformative impact that could be effected by seemingly technical trade and association agreements.
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European soft power
Obviously, Putin fears European soft power, since it is a force to which he has no response. Russia’s lack of attraction is one of its most serious weak spots. Its leverage rests on its state-controlled extracting industries and its military.
The ideology of integration has become a new nationalism, which has as its core mission the resurrection of the Russian space.
On Ukraine, EU leaders have chosen not to follow Putin’s shift from soft power to hard power. In political terms, their sanctions do not have as much effect on Putin’s Russia as they would have on a Russia that was seeking cooperation and trying to build a modern and competitive economy. To Moscow, Europe’s insistence on negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine makes it look weak – indeed, it has allowed Russia to prevail in its attempt to neutralize Ukraine and prevent its departure to the West.
A veritable stalemate
The EU is not pursuing an expansionist strategy and it will not wrest the country from Russia’s grip, but neither will it close the door on Ukraine or on any of its neighbors – not even on Russia.
In the end, Putin will find that creating integration on Russian terms will have problematic implications.
But for now, the consequences for those in Ukraine who would like to see their country integrated into EU and NATO are tragic. Russia may very well stop the process by way of militant separatism, and moreover, Ukraine’s economy, governance and democracy are too weak to allow it to join the West.
Meanwhile, in its own house on the other side of the Kremlin’s dividing line, the EU will need to consolidate economic and social prosperity for all people under its roof, including the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Russians who must not be left marginalized and alienated in their home countries.
To achieve this, Europe will need to integrate still further; it should rethink defense integration and install more robust processes so that it can maintain a coherent foreign policy position.
Ironically, Vladimir Putin could thus become an external federator of Europe – while his attempt to unite Eurasia could show up the real diversity of the actors within what he imagines as being the Russian space.
About Josef Janning
Josef Janning is a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
http://www.theglobalist.com/ruxit-is-real-russias-exit-from-europe/
Russia and the West: The Unpopular Prospect of World War III
Why have relations between the West and Russia become increasingly frosty?
By Andreas Umland, January 14, 2009
· Until August 2008, it appeared that Dmitry Medvedev's rise might usher in a new stage in Russian-Western relations.
· Today, there is little ground for hope that the deep contamination of Russia's public discourse could be reversed.
· The example of the Weimar Republic illustrates the dangers that a conspirological view of the world has among a country's population.
A plain extrapolation of recent political developments in Russia leads one to regard outright war with NATO as a still improbable, yet possible scenario. It is not unlikely that Russian public discourse will, during the coming years, continue to move in the same direction in, and with the same speed with, which it has been evolving since 2000.
What is in store for the world is not only a new "cold," but also the possibility of a "hot" and, perhaps even, nuclear war.
This assessment sounds not only apocalyptic, but also alarmingly "unmodern." Aren't the real challenges of the 21st century global warming, financial regulation, the North-South divide, international migration, etc.? Isn't that enough to worry about, and should we really distract ourselves from solving these real problems by falling victim to phobias of yesteryear?
Russian public opinion and elite discourse have — until August 2008, largely unnoticed in the West — made a fundamental shift in recent years. The 1990s began with Russia's enthusiastic embrace of the Western value system and partnership, and they ended with Russian skepticism and bitterness towards the West.
This fundamental shift in Russian public opinion and elite discourse was less the result of NATO expansion or the bombing of Yugoslavia. Rather, it was a consequence of Yeltsin's failure in the early 1990s to remove many of the Soviet Union's elites from their positions of power and influence.
This gave the ancien régime's representatives an opportunity to impregnate post-Soviet political discourse with a reformulated, yet again fundamentally dualistic, world-view. Under this framework, Russia and the United States remain archenemies fighting not only for control of the former Russian empire — but also deciding the future fate of humanity.
Originally, manifestations of this were visible only in the margins. With the beginning of Vladimir Putin's rise in 1999, however, they started to slowly but steadily move into the political center.
Today, the idea that the Western (or, at least, Anglo-Saxon) political leaders are deeply Russophobic is commonplace in Russia. That events like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine or Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia were fundamentally inspired, if not directly organized by the CIA, is considered a truism in today's Russia.
That the CIA or another Western secret service is behind 9/11 or the Beslan tragedy is a fully respected assessment frequently discussed in mainstream Moscow mass media. That the current behavior of the West and its supposed puppets in Eastern Europe has much in common with Nazi Germany's policies is an opinion with which many Russians would readily agree.
Such collective paranoia is not only regrettable, but also dangerous. The nation that is beholden by these bizarre views has still a weapons arsenal large enough to erase humanity several times over.
Until August 2008, it appeared that Dmitry Medvedev's rise might usher in a new stage in Russian-Western relations. After the Russian-Georgian war and the disciplining effect it had on the new president, that prospect has become slim again.
Today, there is little ground for hope that the deep contamination of Russia's public discourse could be reversed — or, at least, its further evolution be stopped, in the short-term future. The example of the Weimar Republic illustrates that a conspirological view of the world among the majority of a country’s population might even prepare the ground for the rise of fascism.
In Russia, the West's reputation has suffered not only, as in much of the world, from the various international escapades of the Bush Administration and Blair cabinet. Reminding the Entente's misguided behavior towards Germany after World War I, the West has — through its usual arrogance as well as simple inattention — regularly ignored legitimate Russian interests in the former Soviet Union.
In Georgia and Ukraine, the West is leaving largely uncommented the frequently undemocratic policies of national regimes that were, and are, infringing the interests and feelings of national minorities — not the least of ethnic Russians.
Scandalously, the EU has accepted as members the Baltic ethnocracies that have, to one degree or another, made their Russian-speaking populations hostages to former Soviet policies: The governments of Latvia and Estonia deny their large Russophone minorities elementary political rights on the basis of dubious ethnocentric arguments long discredited in Western Europe.
As there is little prospect that the West will develop the strength or even willingness to correct these and similar inconsistencies in its international behavior, Moscow's falcons will find it easy to further demonize the Western elites.
The latter, in turn, will face an acrimonious choice when it comes to following up on their promise to Georgia and Ukraine that these countries shall become members of NATO — an organization seen as fundamentally anti-Russian by both Moscow's intellectuals and the Russian common man.
Unless something fundamentally changes in Russian-Western relations, we will — as the Russian-Georgian war illustrated — continue to live on the brink of an armed confrontation between two nuclear superpowers.
About Andreas Umland
Andreas Umland teaches in the German and European Studies program at the Mohyla Academy in Kiev, Ukraine.
http://www.theglobalist.com/russia-and-the-west-the-unpopular-prospect-of-world-war-iii/
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